So every says "oh i miss spell crafting" or "I miss acrobatics" No you know what i miss? the dedicated shops that were easy to find. You go to imperial city in Oblivion to the market district and you have the shield shop, the book shop, spells, 1 hand weapons, 2 hand weapons, armor, staves and just so much choice you don't have to settle for a "general" goods store. If there is one thing i miss from Oblivion it's that, and that you can get a better deal selling 1 hand weapons to 1 hand store compared to a 2 hand store.

Before skyrim came out i read that Whiterun would be skyrim's version of the imperial city and quit frankly it's not you have a general goods store, a smith and an archery shop, no book store...

thoughts?

I put that under the category of Small City Complaints.

Just imagine how much bigger the cities would be if they took people out of those stalls and put them in actual shops, then added all the other shops you're talking about.

Never really thought of the stalls... i guess they make up for that... but in the big cities like Whiterun, Solitude and Whindhelm you would think they would at least have book stores! and what not.

Book stores as in spells or book stores as in books?

Nords aren't very fond of Magic. I do agree on the book store thing though, you're telling me the only reading that ever goes on is in the College of Winterhold with that Orc?

I like the general goods stores, if I don't have all that much to sell but it's varied I don't want to make half a dozen stops to unload it all because I haven't taken a bunch of speech perks. If I had to choose between "general merchants" only or "specialty merchants" only I'd go with the former every time. And I think having a store that only sells 1H or 2H weapons but not both would be kinda unrealistic, particularly since it's primarily the smiths themselves who sell the bulk of the weapons and they wouldn't just be making *one* kind of weapon and nothing else.

I agree to a certain degree. I do believe the cities in the game are a little nerfed compared to the whole expanse of the wild. I mean, the the only decent ones are solitude and maybe riften. The rest seem to be a little small for my tastes. Let's not even take into account that sad excuse for a town called winterhold...

Winterhold has like...1 Merchant, an Inn, the Jarl's House, and one random guys house lol. It's pathetic.

Solitude annoys me to no end.

Which part, when you see shadows and freak out only to realize they're birds? ahah

Thats the thing that really gets to me about Skyrim. Imperial City actually felt like a proper city, but there is nothing like it in Skyrim.

To be fair, Whitehaven has two smiths, plus a special archery shop. Windhelm has one smith... but two general merchants. Both have alchemist shops. I didn't spend a lot of time in Solitude, but i seem to recall a certain amount of variety. Riften as well: not a lot of time spent there yet, but I recall it having a decent set of shops. The other towns just seem to be tiny.

It makes sense to me that there is nothing in Skyrim that compares to the Imperial City. There really shouldn't be.

You are totally right. Why is there no bookstore? Solitude should have one in the very least.

No. Because as far as I can figure, the people designing the exterior of the buildings didn't bother talking to the people designing the interiors. Other cities and buildings have the same problem, but it seems most noticeable and prevalent in Solitude.

The archery shop should actually sell more archery equipment. Why can't I find a decent supply of high level arrows in any quantity, regardless of price? And why don't the 'smiths actually... you know, smith?

True. I still think the game was rushed. It could have been much more polished if they had waited another 6 months or a year maybe.

Winterhold fell victim to a great disaster taking most of the town with it... or have you forgotten that?

The cities are cut down for whatever reason. I remember seeing a picture someone did of Balmora from Morrowind based on what they had read outside of the game and it was much larger than the ingame version.

We all remember, it's shoved in your face as soon as you talk to anybody from the town. I understand getting destroyed, but seriously...an Inn, 2 houses, and a jarl's longhouse? They could have rebuilt some of it. Hell, even if winterhold never got destroyed, there's not that many destroyed houses either. It's smaller than Ivarstead for god's sake.

My issue has more to do with the fact that other than a few abandoned houses (which could have been from anything), there's no evidence of the great disaster. The only reason we have any idea what happened is because of a book and a few people telling us about it. Talk about a missed opportunity to create a very interesting location.

The abandoned and ruined houses you can still see in Winterhold do not represent the full magnitude of the disaster. Most of the city fell into the ocean... from what I understand it was situated on land that used to surround the College and all of that except for the bit the College sits on collapsed into the Sea of Ghosts. The ruined houses you can see are more likely just houses that survived the collapse but were damaged and never repaired because there's nobody there to live in them anyway. Or they were abandoned after the collapse by people who gave up and moved away and they've just been left to rot because no one cares enough to reclaim and rebuild them.

Even going into the towns, if they had just given each one a blacksmith (what town wouldn't have a blacksmith?) and a general merchant, it would have made them feel bigger. Plus it would have given us more reason to visit them.

That was... 80 years ago? Do the people ride the carriage all the way to Windhelm for all their shopping? Can we at least tear down the ruined buildings for firewood? That place is like Detroit or something...

To me it feels like they crammed in Morthal and Dawnstar to an area that should have had one big town and one province. And that they made Whiterun and decided that it was the "template" for the largest town and everything else had to be the same size or smaller. And I really dont get how Winterhold is even in the game, its a pointless addition that defies common sense.

Skyrim's biggest city is little more than a brick walled Hla Oad.

I'd never thought about it that way. It's true, though.

I think part of the size of the cities comes down to the lack of different factions. I mean, in a town the size of the average Skyrim town, do you need more than on e tavern, more than one general store, etc.? Probably not. But if you have a bar where the Thieves Guild hang out, a bar where the Commona Tong hang out (or whatever the Nordic equivalent would be), a place for the Fighters and Mages, etc. ... suddenly you have a place that feels a lot bigger, even if essentially al you have are several different types of inn.

So for me, basically, more factions = better towns.

Skyrim is not Cyrodiil, it's not as cosmopolitan and the requirements of it's populace are not the same.